Soon™, in addition to providing real-time feedback about your critical applications and services from a dashboard view, you can look forward to these Spiceworks Network Monitor features:

User Error Monitoring - We'll soon be able to integrate voice recognition and "always on" listening services such as OK Google, Siri, and Amazon Echo with the Spiceworks Network Monitor's dashboard to alert you any time a user utters a phrase that suggests PEBCAK error within earshot of an enabled device. We'll pre-populate the tool to listen for common phrases such as "My computer hates me" or "I deleted the Internet" or "Is the server down?" You can add your own phrases into the mix too. For example, you can create an alert if a user says, "My computer runs slow when I have more than 20 applications open." When this feature rolls out, you can even get the funniest user sayings transcribed in real time and sent to you via email or SMS, so you can post them in the Water Cooler that much faster.

Video Streaming Shaming - It's March Madness time! Just like during World Cup season, half of your office is trying to stream HD video through a tiny pipe and they don't understand that additional bandwidth costs a lot of money. To remedy the situation, you could block ports or websites to prevent streaming, but you don't want your users to hate you and don't want to feel like "Big Brother." Soon this new feature will give users the freedom of being able to browse their favorite sites as usual, but if the Network Monitor finds any particular bandwidth hogs, it will send anonymous, innocuous shaming messages to key offenders like, "You know you can just check the scores after the game is over... right :)" or "I know you're DVR-ing this at home, and the Internet ain't free" or "The Internet really is a series of tubes, and you're clogging them up with your basketball game."

Zombie Monitor – While SpiceHeads love a great zombie show, they hate it when the undead try to break into the server room IRL. With this upcoming feature, you can track in real time where walkers are via GPS, how many brains they’ve eaten, and the current walk status of any users that share their motion sensor data (useful for determining who's been newly zombified). Currently this functionality works only with users or undead who carry smartphones that we can track through MDM, but realistically any recently-turned walkers will have a device thanks to the proliferation of BYOD (and you have a great MDM strategy, right?). With this feature you'll know the latest on an impending zombie apocalypse hours before your users decide to submit a ticket!

When are these great features launching?

﻿We know you're excited about being able to do all of this from a single dashboard equally suited for managing another typical day at work, catching users playing hooky, or protecting against the zombie apocalypse.

﻿We'd like to make these features available ASAP, but we got caught up on another project – Bovine Aviation – and couldn't make the April 1 target date. That said, if you're excited about the new functionality, you can stay in touch! For the latest, private message me, Peter (Spiceworks) in the community with the subject line "61 70 72 69 6c 20 66 6f 6f 6c 73."

I couldn't help but note that the host that's offline in the screenshot is my home PC.

(It's really named perseus. The wife's is medusa, which was an inspiration from me leaving it with all of the cabling draped over the sides of the case while building it and then seeing them as snakes.)